Vaccines: Assessing Canada's COVID Response

It’s been five years since COVID hit and one part of me wants to stuff it all in a closet somewhere and forget about it. But perhaps certain events - and especially government errors and overreach - should be documented. So this post will identify actions at all levels of government from those early days that, given our understanding of the threat available through the benefit hindsight, were both misguided and damaging.

I haven't completely forgotten the mood through the early months in 2020. Politicians faced near-unanimous public demand for an aggressive response. Much of that sentiment was the result of messaging coming from foreign governments (mostly in the U.S.). But the local sentiment was definitely there.

To be fair, Governments got some things right and, taking into account the chaos and uncertainty of those early months, even some of their mistakes were understandable. But it's the job of government to lead. And to avoid making choices - even popular choices - that will lead to predictable harms.

Vaccine mandates starting in 2021 were a case in point. Federal authority largely stemmed from the 2005 Quarantine Act and the Contraventions Act that allowed officials to issue tickets for non-compliance with the Quarantine Act. Provincial mandates were based on laws like Ontario’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act. The question isn’t whether the mandates and their enforcement were legal, but whether they caused more harm than good.

As the first vaccines started arriving in Canada around February 2021, I planned to be “first in line” for the shots as soon as my age cohort became eligible. By early March however, COVID itself dropped by the house, leading to the most uncomfortable (although non life-threatening) week of my life.

After recovering, my family doctor advised me to wait three months before getting the shots so my body could get back to normal. During those months, I got access to preprint results from the Israeli study into natural immunity which showed that:

Natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity

Those results were later confirmed by CDC and NEJM studies, among others.

Given that context, I didn’t see any justification for exposing myself to even minimal health risks associated with vaccines. Which meant that, despite demonstrably posing no threat to public health, I would (at various times) be unable to:

• Board domestic commercial flights, VIA Rail, Rocky Mountaineer trains, and cruise ships within Canada

• Board international flights or trains departing Canada

• Freely return to Canada through an overland point of entry

• Upon return to Canada, bypass the 14 day quarantine under the Quarantine Act

• Upon return to Canada via air, bypass the three day quarantine in (expensive) government-approved hotels

• Engage in ‘non-essential” activities like restaurants, gyms, events (details varied from province to province)

• Enter Parliament

• Seek employment in federally regulated air, rail, and marine sectors

What should Canadian governments have done? Remove restrictions on individuals with natural immunity, obviously. Which, by the way, would have come with the valuable bonus of entirely avoiding the truckers protest and consequent confrontations.

If authorities were reluctant to take us at our word on immunity, they could have followed the European Union’s lead by emulating their Digital COVID Certificate for proof of recovery. Were they worried about people without immunity creating fake certificates? Hard to take that one seriously. There were more fake vaccine passports littering the streets of Ontario than abandoned Toronto Maple Leafs car window flags in a normal early May.

In the end, my own suffering was negligible. I didn’t really want to visit family in the U.S. all that much anyway. But for millions of other Canadians, the real-world stakes were far higher. And all that’s besides the billions of dollars wasted during those years’ government policies.

To be sure, resisting unscientific street-level calls for vaccine mandates would have required courage. But shouldn’t acts of courage be a source of pride for public officials?